An Eclectic Journal of Opinion, History, Poetry and General Bloviating

Monday, July 30, 2012

Ike Goes Where the Founders Wouldn’t

The crest of Cold War and Anti-Communist hysteria may have passed by July 30, 1956, but there
was still plenty of residual energy.President Dwight D. Eisenhower, perhaps
somewhat reluctantly, signed a bill that designated the words “In God We Trust” as the official Motto of the United States.

The year before Congress had acted to require that the
phrase be put on all coins and bills.

Of course the U.S. had
a de facto motto which had long been
included on coins and currency—E Pluribus Unim, usually translated
“out of many, one.”That phrase was
approved in 1792 for the Great Seal of
the United States.It did not
satisfy fervid religionists.

Indeed the Great Seal
itself, which was filled with Masonic and
Deist symbolism without a hint Christian piety, had been a bone of
contention since the first struggles over the proper role of religion in the
Republic.The largely Deistic founders
had purposefully omitted any referenced to God in the Constitution and the Bill of
Rights was silent on the subject except to prohibit Congress from the
“establishment” of any religion or interfering with the religious observances
of its citizens.Practical men with a
knowledge of history, they were concerned lest a favored religion or a defined
heresy create civil discord and perhaps civil war.

Washington
and
Jefferson occasionally invoked a
vague Deity, most often referred to Providence,
Nature’s God, or sometimes the God of Creation, all common Deist
constructions for an original moving
force of the Universe.They avoided
terms like the Lord God which
invoked the patriarchal deity of the
Old Testament and never invoked Jesus Christ.

John
Adams, a true product of the Puritan tradition as it evolved eventually into Unitarianism, firmly believed that
organized religion was necessary to constrain the “passions” of an innately
sinful humanity.Moreover he was
politically indebted to the support of the Black
Legion—the clergy of the New England
Standing Order—against “atheistic” Jeffersonian Republicanism.Yet even he
resisted considerable pressure to inject explicitly Christian prayer, practice,
and symbolism into official use.

A complex battle
between the evolving movement of Evangelical
Protestantism and republican secularism
see-sawed back and forth for the first decades of the nation’s
existence.Some compromises were
unofficially reached, but on the whole the government remained resolutely
secular, nor were Presidents even expected to make personal religious
declarations.

During the crisis of
the Civil War, however, President Abraham Lincoln needed the
fervent support of the Protestant clergy, particularly its avidly abolitionist voices.Not a personally “saved” Christian, and
deeply influenced by the Founder’s secular Deism, Lincoln non-the-less was a
student of the Bible as literature
and was adept at echoing its cadences and invoking powerful Biblical language
in his speeches.But he was always being
pressed by the clergy to make more overt religious statements.

It was in this context that
Lincoln called for national days of fasting and Thanksgiving.He also undoubtedly approved when his Treasury Secretary, the devout Salmon P. Chase, first directed the Mint to inscribe the words “In God We
Trust” on a two cent coin issued in 1864.The approbation of the preachers far outweighed the slight protests of Freethinkers and over the next decades
most—but not all—coins added the phrase as they were re-designed.

Government issued Greenback currency, however, contained
no religious declaration, just a practical promise to pay the bearer in specie upon demand.

And so the situation
stayed until the dawn of the Cold War.Then Catholics, who had long
been reluctant to join with Protestants in any religious demands on the
government because they assumed, quite rightly, that the Protestants would
insist on narrow language that excluded Catholic worship, became particularly
alarmed at the rise of “atheistic Communism” and the suppression of Catholic
worship in the new Soviet Satellites
in Eastern Europe.Leading anti-Communist Prelates launched a campaign to require
“In God We Trust” on currency as well as all coins and to make it an official
motto.

Federal authorities,
who were eager to use those same Bishops to influence the heavily Catholic industrial
working class against “Communist infiltration” of the labor movement, were more than glad to add religious arrows to
their crusade against Reds.

When leading Protestant
Evangelicals fell into line, the movement in Congress became irresistible even to
those who were squeamish.What Congressman wanted to be painted as
voting against God?

Controversy over the
motto and its use on currency and coins has never gone away.Church and state separation advocates, civil libertarians, and increasingly
vocal atheist activists have
repeatedly challenged the motto and its use on coins and currency in
court.And just as routinely have
lost.

In the case of Aronow v. United States in 1970, the Ninth
Circuit Court of Appeals ruled, “It is quite obvious that the national
motto and the slogan on coinage and currency ‘In God We Trust’ has nothing
whatsoever to do with the establishment
of religion. Its use is of patriotic or ceremonial character and bears no
true resemblance to a governmental sponsorship of a religious exercise.”The Supreme
Court declined to hear an appeal.In
another case The Supreme Court upheld the motto in because it has “lost through
rote repetition any significant religious content.”

With public support of continued use of the motto on coins and currency
standing at 90% in a 2003 Gallup Poll
it does not appear that the phrase will be going away any time soon.